International Journal of Trend in Research and Development, Volume 3(2), ISSN: 2394-9333
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Poetic Voice of Sarojini Naidu: A Study
1
K.Latha and 2N. Mannarsamy,
H.O.D., Assistant Professor, 1,2Department of English,
Joseph Arts and Science College, Thirunavalur, Villupuram, India
1
2
Abstract: Sarojini Naidu is a prominent figure in preindependence Indian English poetry. She is consider to be a
dreamer, born in a dreamless age and an ardent, versatile
and dynamic genius and unsurpassable for her sweet and
melodies songs which are unsurpassed in the entire range
of Indian English poetry as a magnificent and colorful
album of Indian life. This thesis makes an attempt to
discuss in detail Sarojini Naidu‟s portrayal. In this process,
I probe the poet‟s autobiography, which bears upon her
poetry on the Folk themes, the irresistible fascination of
Nature and Spring, Love, Life and Death.
Keywords: Poetic voices, Sarojini Naidu, Nature poems,
the snake and humayun to zobeida and the time of roses.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Like Tagore and Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu too
was more than a poet, she was one of Mother India‟s most
gifted children, readily shared her burden of pain, fiercely
articulating her agonies and hopes, and gallantly striving to
redeem the Mother and redeem the time. As an English
poet she first caught the attention of the public, but that
was only the beginning. In course of time the patriot
exceeded the poet, and Sarojini Naidu came to occupy
some of the highest unofficial and official positions in the
public of India.
Fifty-five years ago, when Sarojini Naidu made a
trip to England in search of health there took place between
her and the great nationalist leader, Gopal Krishna
Gokhale. She had to fight without remission the battle of
her health losing and winning and losing again and she had
to struggle long against the bludgeoning of circumstance,
neither wincing nor crying aloud. Sunniess and sadness,
life and death, victory and defeat early they set up their
joint sceptre in her life, in her soul.
Sarojini Naidu was a distinguished poet, renowed
freedom fighter and one of the great orators of her time.
She was famously known as Bharatiya Kokila (The
Nightingale of India). Sarojini Naidu was the first Indian
woman to become the president of the Indian National
Congress and the first woman to become the governor of a
state in India.
Sarojini Naidu was born on February 13, 1879. Her
father Aghoranath Chattopadhyaya was a scientist and
philosopher. He was the founder of the Nizam College,
Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu‟s mother Barada Sundari Devi
was a poetess and used to write poetry in Bengali. Sarojini
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Naidu was the eldest among the eight siblings. One of her
brothers Birendranath was a revolutionary and her other
brother Harindranath was a poet, dramatist, and actor.
Sarojini Naidu was a brilliant student. She was
proficient in Urdu, Telugu, English, Bengali, and Persian.
At the age of twelve, she attained national frame when she
topped the matriculation examination at Madras
University, Her father wanted her to become a
mathematician or scientist but she was interested in poetry.
She started writing poems in English. Impressed by her
poetry, Nizam of Hyderabad, gave her scholarship to study
abroad. At the age of 16, she traveled to England to study
first at Kings‟s College, London and later at Girton
College, Cambridge. There she met famous laureates of her
time such as Arthur Simon and Edmond Gausse. It was
Gausse who convinced her to stick to Indian themesIndia‟s great moutians, rivers, temples, social milieu, to
express her poetry. She depicted contemporary Indian life
and events. Her collections The Golden Threshold (1905],
The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1912)
attracted huge Indian and English readers.
II.
POETIC VOICES
Sarojini Naidu is popularly known as the Bharat
Kokila or The Nightingale of India, is the most lyrical
woman poet. In her perfect lyricism and mellifluous
melody she is indeed the nightingale of India. She is a
singer of India‟s glory, India‟s present, India‟s fauna and
flora. She pictures in melodious strains the landscape of
the Deccan. Whereas the western critics would categorize
her with Shelley and Keats. She once described herself as
a wild free thing of the air like the birds with a song in her
heart. This self portrait reveals her essential poetic
temperament and lyrical gifts. Sponteneity and naturalness
of manner give her poetry a distinct bird like quality and
melodic beauty. Besides a melodist and a singer, she is a
lover of beauty. She is a romanticist too. She deals with
love as a major theme in her poetry. Her poems reveal the
authentic heart of India. Under advice from Edmund
Gosse she undertook to write on Indian themes and
subjects. As the nightingale of India, Sarojini Naidu is also
sensitive to beauty, the beauty of living things, the beauty
of holiness, the beauty of Buddha‟s compassion, the beauty
of Brindavan‟s land. She did not specially seek the bizarre,
the exotic, the exceptional, but her poems lack neither the
variety nor the flavour of actuality.
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International Journal of Trend in Research and Development, Volume 3(2), ISSN: 2394-9333
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Her poetry is frankly the poetry of nature. Her love
of nature is reflected even in poems which are not about
nature, but have a different theme. Nature in the external
environment of man, and Sarojini looks at it with a childlike, open-eyed wonder. Her response to nature is simple
and innocent like that of a child who looks at nature with
fascination and is struck with awe by her grandeur and her
mystery. It is the homely and the familiar that fascinates
Sarojini; she shuts her eyes to the ugly and the terrible in
nature. Similarly, she does not philosophise nature. We do
not get in her poetry any consistent world view which
defines the relationship of God, Man and Nature. She is
neither pantheistic like Wordsworth nor cosmic like
Tagore.
She has a woman‟s or poet‟s partiality for spring. Many of
her poems are full of spring imagery. She draws loving
picture of gulmohurs, golden cassias, nasturtiums,
champak blossoms, wild lilies, and the bright pomegranate
buds. She offers the odours of henna, sarisha and neem.
She gives us a chance Lo hear the melodious songs of
various birds and the buzzing of bees. It is altogether a
picture of lost innocence, to us in modern India, caught up
as we are in fever and fret of materialism.
Besides having a woman‟s love of words, she also
had a woman‟s love of flowers and precious stones. The
result is an opulent, colourful diction which is entirely he
list own but which has also exposed her to some criticisms.
For example, only Sarojini Naidu could speak of the
burning and speckled evening sky, jewelled with embers of
opal and peridote. Such colourful word pictures are
frequent in her poetry. It is her feminine love of words
which leads her into many an adjectival excess which are
said to blur the vision and dilute the emotion but which
have a charm and fascination of their own. It is her love of
words which gives to her, her phrase - making power,
phrases which are aglow with imagination, with
exuberation and which consequently strike deep, bite in, so
to say, and are easily remembered. Here are a few
examples of such trenchant, sensuous and passional
phrases selected at random‟. „Silver tears of sorrow‟ (silver
Tears), „lyric bloom‟, „melodious leaves‟ (Ashoka Bloom),
„a carnival of lights‟, „Sanctuary of sorrow‟, „a spectre in
the rose-encircled shroud‟, „echoing bough‟, „blossoming
hopes unharvested‟ (The poet to Death) , „the wakening
skies‟, „the leaping wealth of tide‟, „ the kiss of the spray‟,
„the dance of the wild foam‟s glee‟ (Coromandel Fishers).
IV. POEMS ON COMMON INDIAN LIFE
III. THE ART OF SAROJINI NAIDU
Sarojini Naidu was a conscientious artist who
believed that a poet should have the gift of communication
before he publishes his poems. In other words, his
compositions should have clarity before it is fit for
publication. He should revise and polish what he writes, till
this perfection is achieved. When Arthur Symons advised
her to publish her poems, she was hesitant because she felt
that she still lacked this gift communication, and she set
out painstakingly to cultivate it. The result is a distinctive
style which, is her own, and which, when at her best,
acquires an almost classical felicity of expression. It should
also be remembered that she was much influenced by the
English romantics and, pre-Raphaelites, and as such her
diction has a sensuous warmth and opulence characteristic
of the romantic poets. Her diction was certainly influenced
by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and others, and it is certainly
over — hung with pre-Raphaelite tapestry and decor, but it
is not imitative. It has an, Individual beauty of its own and
carries with its own peculiar aura and charm.
This distinctive and original flavour of her diction
is accounted for in a number of ways. She was a woman
and had a woman‟s partiality for words. She has a
woman‟s love of words. They are not, to her, just
convenient instruments of expression, they were things,
precious, lovely things, like jewels. She rejoices in poly —
syllables that roll and rumble, or rattle like long burnished
swords in phrases like „lovely stalactite of dreams‟, or, „in
the long dread, incalculable hour‟.
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Sarojini Naidu exploited to the full the resources of
the English language, and when it suited her purpose she
did not hesitate to introduce into her lyrics words from the
native languages. “Govinda, Govinda”, “Ram re Ram”,
“Ya Allah”, “Allah ho Akbar”, and many more such
examples readily come to mind. Such use of Indian words,
exclamations and cries is quite appropriate in poems
dealing with the life of the Indian folk. They impart an
Indian colour to her songs and lyrics which also acquire in
this way an incantatory, or mantric quality. They enable
her to convey shades of meaning, which could not have
been conveyed by the use of their Indian flavour and
finesse of meaning, and will appear grotesque if translated
into English. An idea of this fault can be formed from such
translations in the novels of Mulk Raj Anand. However,
she has been criticised for such use of Indian words and
phrases. For example Lotika Basu is severely critical of
what she calls Sarojini‟s Pseud Indianism in the use of
vernacular words which have no evocative associations for
the English reader. The result is a thin veneer of Indianism
which diminishes and strains the verbal flow of poetic
feeling. Sarojini‟s diction is a synthesis of various cultures
and modes of expression. It is never Western romantic
feeling working in isolation that we have in her poetry.
Romantic assertion is Sanskritized, even as
Vaishnavit affirmation is persianized, and sufi mystic
intuition is westernized. Her poetic diction depends more
on the melodic phrase than on verbal adhesion, and in this
she clearly follows the Sanskrit example of “Samasa”
(what Empson calls “complex structures‟). Although, from
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International Journal of Trend in Research and Development, Volume 3(2), ISSN: 2394-9333
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the purely “English” point of view, this strains her
linguistic resources, it enlivens the feeling the imagery and
the perception, “Pomegranate gardens of the mellowing
dawn”, “Night‟s hyacinthine gloom”, “the wise
compassionate glory of your face”, are Romantic, or PreRaphaelite, only on the surface. In reality they are related
to the massive compositional technique in Indian
vernacular poetry. If we ignore the native idiom, they give
the impression of swinburnian effusion, or needless
stylization. But placed in context, they recall the amplitude,
spaciousness and improvisational freedom and adjustability
of Sanskrit poetry. Thus her diction is seen to be an
expression of her Indianness and of her artistic sincerity,
and many of the so-called faults of hers are positive
virtues. They place her firmly in the Indian tradition
stretching from Kali Das to Tagore.
CONCLUSION
Sarojini Naidu is a conscientious artist. She
believes in the Poet‟s having a gift of Communication. She
has the classicist‟s perfection and refinement and the
sensuousness of the romanticists. Her diction is influenced
by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and the pre-Raphelites.
Her poetry is remarkable for its ease and
spontaneity. Words flow from her pen as honey from a
bee-hive.
Brevity, melody, subjectivity, intensity of
emotion, condensed thought - these features of lyric poetry
are found in her poetry, who works on an inch of ivory
very perfectly. Violent, passions, industrial problems,
Freudian libido, deep mystic experiences unnatural themes,
and supernatural haunts are unknown to her.
Mostly Sarojini‟s Poems are lyrical. The fact that
she did not write any dramatic, epic or narrative poetry nor
any blank verse shows that she is only a lyricist and a
singer and nothing more, and since she sings of India
realistically and truly and sincerely, she is our authentic
singer. Her technical skill, her ability to choose right
words, her rich diction and love for phrases, her mastery of
melody, her emotional intensity and warmth of passion, her
commend of language and above all her rich imagination
obviously make us conclude that she had genuine poetic
talent. The oppositeness of sentiments and imagery and the
perfect management of the rhymes have made her songs
lovely and memorable.
References
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
Naidu, Sarojini. Songs. Madras: The Macmillan co., 1986.
The Bird of Time. London: William Heinernann, 1905.
The Gift of India. Hydrabad: December, 1915.
Abbas, K.A. Sarojini Naidu. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya
Bhava, 1921.
[5] Abidi, S.Z.H. Studies in Indo Anglian Poetry, Bareilly :
Prakash Book Depot, 1979.
[6] Ahuja, Sahib Singh. “The Humour of Sarojini Naidu.” The
Modern Review 38.2 (1962): 173—80.
[7] Anand, M.L. “The Nightingale of India.” Indian Affairs 2.6
(1931): 18-26.
[8] Auslander, Joseph. “A Woman of India.” The Modern
Review 34.4 (1934): 230-31.
[9] “Last Moments of Sarojini Naidu.” Swatantra 4.5 (1940):
39-40.
[10] Bannerji, Hirahmay. How Thou Singesh, My Master,
Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1961.
[11] Bhatnagar, Arun. “The Socptred Flute of Indian Polities.” The
Hindustan Times 18.2 (1979): 40-46.
Sarojini is the poetess of life and love; equally she is the
poetess of the challenge of suffering and pain and death to
life, which enables her to look straight into the eyes of
death and face it boldly too. Life and death both, according
to her, constitute the mingled web existence, life remains
incomplete without a combination of both. She is really
ashamed to encounter death scheme facedly.
Sarojini‟s Poems breathe an Indian air in all its fresheners,
glory and romanticism. They are mellifluous and catching
and disclose a depth of feeling that is rare in the works of
most of her contemporary writers of English verse. From
her collection Sarojini Naidu emerges as a distinguished
poeters. Her poetry is marked by her delicate imagination
and melodious language and is remarkable for its command
of English. Her poetry reveals to us the various phase of
Indian life. The genius of Mrs. Naidu is essentially lyrical.
Most of her poems are crises of the heart of joy, sorrow,
fervour and exultation. There is an intensity of feeling in
many of her best pieces; coupled with this there is a
magical cadence in verses which are astonishing.
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